Jeanine Michna-Bales
Jeanine Michna-Bales’s images from her Underground Railroad photo essay have appeared in exhibitions around the United States and are currently part of a traveling exhibition through 2022. A publication of the series, Through Darkness to Light, was released in April (Princeton Architectural Press, 2017). Michna-Bales was named to the Critical Mass Top 50 in 2014 and most recently in 2017.
In Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad Jeanine Michna-Bales recreates the long voyage north toward freedom as it might have looked through the eyes of a single individual “oftentimes carrying little more than the knowledge that moss grows on the north side of trees.” These photographs of unpeopled rural landscapes, taken almost exclusively under the cover of descending or ebbing darkness, have about them a sense of both intimacy and mystery, conveying “how vast, strange, and forbidding these remote places must have felt to those making the journey” with an almost painful steadiness of vision.
